Does your child have Nature Deficit Disorder?

A new book says that children today need to get outside more - and that,
despite the perceived dangers, parents should let them play without being
watched over

Sisters Ruby (4) and Isla (2) Norman play in the bluebell-covered woods near their home in Heathfield, East Sussex. PHOTO: Photo: CIARAN McCRICKARD

By Julia Llewelyn Smith

7:00AM BST 21 Jun 2009

In a sunlit corner of the London Wetland Centre in Barnes, south-west London, my daughter, Clemmie, two, is bending perilously over a pond. "Mummy! Green stuff! Fishies," she coos. Entranced, her sister, Sasha, four, stares at a butterfly. "He is my friend," she declares.

Watching them, my heart swells with delighted relief. Like most parents, I am terrorised by images of my 21st-century children growing up sun-starved and chubby, wedded to their Nintendo console and thinking that bacon comes from cows and that milk is concocted in a backroom lab at Tesco.

Next month the pressure to give our children more access to nature will intensify further with the UK publication of Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. A huge bestseller in Louv's native US, the book caused a mini revolution when it was first published in 2005, leading to the forming of the international Children and Nature Network, campaigning to reconnect with the outdoor world.

A former journalist, Louv coined the phrase "nature deficit disorder", arguing that children suffer physically and mentally from lack of contact with nature and pointing out that today's generation are the first to be raised without "meaningful contact with the natural world".

Louv's is by no means a lone voice. A recent report by Play England, the campaigning group for children, showed that the "radius of activity", meaning the distance from home children are allowed to play unsupervised, has declined by 90 per cent since the Seventies. Another report by Natural England revealed that 81 per cent of children would love more play outside. Eighty five per cent of parents agreed, but said fears about traffic and predatory strangers deterred them.

Certainly, the difference between my early-Eighties childhood and today's paranoid world is marked. My brother and cousins spent holidays at our granny's in the Scottish Borders where we enjoyed a Just William-type existence: paddling in the river, exploring derelict buildings and scratching our legs on brambles.

Only recently did I realise that just a few miles away, at this time, 11-year-old Susan Maxwell was abducted, raped and murdered by the serial child killer Robert Black. The following year he did the same to five-year-old Caroline Hogg, just 27 miles from us in Portobello, Lothian. I ask my mother if she was worried or even knew of Black's activities.

"I was aware, but I wasn't really concerned. You were in the middle of nowhere, who was going to swoop in and kidnap you? But I think my post-war generation has a different concept of danger to people today."

Indeed they do. "We live in a tiny village in Devon, where everyone knows everyone, but my neighbours are always saying, 'You can't be too careful these days,' whereas I think you definitely can be too careful," says Tom Hodgkinson, father of three children aged nine, seven and four, and author of The Idle Parent.

"We let our children wander as far as possible before the traffic gets too dangerous, but people tell them off and say: 'Go home, where are your parents?' You have to fight the prejudices of friends and neighbours who've been told constantly how awful the world is and who've understandably let it sink in."

Yet most parents know from experience that the easiest way to calm fractious children is to go outside. Louv backs this up by citing the biophilia theory, coined by a Harvard biologist in 1984, which says that humans are still essentially hunters and gatherers, who biologically require natural contact to thrive.

Louv believes that dozens of maladies from depression to attention deficit disorder can be triggered by alienation from nature and remedied when the contact increases. "The woods were my Ritalin," he writes. Dozens of studies have shown significant decreases in blood pressure in people looking at an aquarium or surveying an open landscape.

Louv also points out that while children today worry about saving the Amazon rainforest, few have ever lain on a forest floor, and that the epidemic in childhood obesity has coincided with the huge rise in children's organised sport which – ironically – leaves no spare time to run around aimlessly.

Nigel Lowthorp knows first hand the transformative effects of nature. At Hill Holt Wood, near Norton Disney, Lincolnshire, Lowthorp has founded a centre for up to 20 boys, aged mainly between 14 to 16, who have been excluded from mainstream education, many of whom have been involved in crime, are illiterate and come from troubled homes. After two years of coppicing overgrown trees, clearing dead undergrowth and chopping logs in the 34-acre wood, the vast majority go on to higher education or employment, an achievement few schools can rival.

"Most will have never been in a rural environment before and it absolutely calms them. When they have their mad moments we send them off into a clearing to sit under a tree and listen to the birds and just think, and the rage vanishes."

Louv believes that children who are not allowed to take risks with nature are more likely to lack creativity and confidence and to court danger in other ways. Lowthorp agrees. "We give 14-year-olds a bill hook, saw and slasher to cut down rhododendrons and show them the basic idea, but a lot of it is about having a go. Sometimes the knife slips and they cut themselves. We have boys who've been carrying around knives in gangs, who faint when they see their own blood. It's how they learn a knife can cause serious damage and to use it responsibly."

The advantages are felt much younger too. A representative from Louv's Children's and Nature Network recently visited the Farley Outdoor Nursery in Salisbury, Wilshire, where children spend virtually all day outside, whatever the weather. Even the six-month-old babies spend much of the day in the sandpit or napping in prams with a view of the sky.

Tracy Frick, whose son, Rafe, four, has attended the nursery for two years, is evangelical about the children's bravery. "They know that nettles sting, that ponds can be dangerous, but they are not frightened. So many parents put the fear of God into their children and wrap them in cotton wool but these children know the consequences of their actions, they know that nature can be dangerous but in a very level-headed sort of way. They pick blackberries from the hedge but my son tells me: 'I can't eat too many or they'll make me ill and I can't eat some berries at all.' "

While such stories are inspiring, I can't help wondering if Louv will only encourage earnest parents to add "building campfires" to their children's activity list, alongside Mandarin and flute. Hodgkinson, for one, has found it challenging to convert his eldest son to wholesome activities.

"I have to physically pull Arthur away from his computer to play in the tree house I built – in fact I've seriously thought of installing a broadband connection to lure him in. He'd far rather look at an ornithology website than go outside and see a real bird. Humans have striven for the past 500 years to better nature with technology so it's hardly surprising our children are seduced by it."

Nor is it just children. Back at the Wetlands, Clemmie and Sasha are blissfully collecting wild flowers and clamouring to play Pooh sticks. Meanwhile – despite my free-range childhood – I am wondering how I can sneak off for a coffee and to read the papers.

"My children are always telling me off for spending too much time on the computer," Hodgkinson sympathises. "I'm a fireside lurker at heart, not an outdoorsman. The trick is to start them building a log cabin and, once they've got going, you can rush inside and check your emails."

* 'Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder' by Richard Louv is published on July 1